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WASHINGTON — The sad, wrenching spectacle we saw yesterday of a grand old man, crumpled in an armchair, his face broken, weeping into his hands, was just another dramatic display of Charlie Rangel’s unstoppable charm.

That is not to say his tears were not genuine. Clearly, Rangel today is a deeply pained man.

But it is that charm — his ability to so easily trade on his enormous personal appeal — that has gotten Rangel into so much trouble and it is how he aims to get himself out of one last fix.

Yes, he may have been the most powerful tax master in the country, but that did not mean he would actually pay his taxes on income from his beachfront villa in the Dominican Republic.

As he once told us in all seriousness, every time he called down there to ask about the taxes, they would start speaking to him in Spanish.

About those four rent-stabilized apartments he was squatting in, using one as a campaign office when the law requires it be his primary residence? He did not ask for those. The good people at Lenox Terrace just wanted to give them to him out of the kindness of their hearts.

As for using congressional letterhead to solicit funds from those with business before his committee for an institute that would bear his name? It was just an office-supply mix-up.

Stretching the boundaries of absurdity, he admitted to us yesterday that, indeed, he was guilty of being “overzealous” in his effort to raise money for the school. That’s like “admitting” that your greatest failing is that you are a perfectionist.

Anyway, he told the House ethics committee, it wasn’t even his idea to name a project after himself — it was CCNY that first approached him. He was just helping out, helpful guy that he is.

This roguish charm is a signature of Charlie Rangel. And it is his greatest sin. It is the root of a colossal hubris that has blinded him from realizing this trial is not about him.

It is about the public trust in an institution — of which he has been among the most powerful leaders — that takes money away from us that we have worked to earn in the name of public good.